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DJI cut its teeth building drones. In the early days of consumer drones, if you said "drone" you probably meant the company's Phantom line. Since those early days the drone market has filled out and over time DJI has branched out. We recently looked at DJI's Osmo Action camera ([WIRED recommends 8/10](https://www.wired.com/review/dji-osmo-action-camera/)) and shortly after that DJI unveiled what it calls an "educational robot." Think of it as a drone that doesn't fly.
DJI's Robomaster S1 robot grew out of the Robomaster robot competitions in China. It's a consumer version of the robots kids are building at your local STEM-friendly school. As such, it's not just a robot, it's a learning experience. You build it, you program it, you battle other robots with it.
### Some Assembly Required
The Robomaster arrives in 23 pieces with 101 screws and a reversible screwdriver to assemble it. It took my kids and I about three hours to put it together.
The instructions contain line drawings and all the parts are labeled so you can figure out what goes where. That said, there's almost no text, just pictures. In some steps, particularly fitting together the wheels, a sentence or two would have saved some effort spent trying to decipher the line drawings.
When you're done assembling you'll have a four-wheeled robot with a swiveling turret mounted on top of a shoebox-size chassis. The turret can either fire infrared light or small gel pellets. The S1 comes with a bottle of pellets, but you need to soak them for a couple hours until they grow to about the size of a small grape. They don't hurt when they hit you, but DJI has limited the turret's angle of fire to keep the focus on other robots and certain modes, like tracking a person, aren't available when pellets are in the S1.
Everything about the S1 is extremely sturdy and well-built. It's mostly plastic, but it's heavy duty plastic and when you're done the S1 feels like a solid piece of equipment, even more so than one of DJI's drones (since weight is not much of a concern, the S1 can afford to be sturdier than a flying drone). The S1 is well balanced and very easy to control. Despite my best efforts I never managed to flip it over.
One of the more striking things about operating the S1 is that it really doesn't turn, it moves sideways. This design is made possible by the [Mecanum wheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel), a conventional wheel with a series of rollers attached at a 45 degree angle. The rollers rotate at 45 degrees to the rotation of the wheel, drawing the vehicle sideways.
You control the S1 through the Robomaster mobile app for iOS and Android. As with DJI's drones there is a controller sold separately. The [RoboMaster S1 Gamepad ($79)](https://store.dji.com/product/robomaster-s1-gamepad){: rel=nofollow} offers a mounting area big enough to hold an iPad, and offers a physical joystick for much more precise control than you get with the virtual joystick in the app. If you plan to battle other S1 robots or just want better control I highly recommend upgrading to the Gamepad.
After pairing your device with your Robomaster you get a view through the turret, with a joystick controller for moving around. There are three basic modes in the app, Solo, Battle and Lab. The first is where you can control S1 on its own, while Battle mode is for fighting with other S1s. Lab is where you can experiment and write programs to control the S1.
The body of the S1 has 31 sensors arrayed around it to pick up on everything from infrared light to impact, as well as a camera that can record 1080p video. These inputs are how the S1 navigates and also how you can control it via the programming interface. Programs can be written in Scratch, a kid-friendly drag-and-drop programming interface, or Python. The Lab portion of the app has a series of training courses design to get kids started writing basic programs to control the S1.
### Kids of All Ages
Ostensibly the Robomaster is aimed at kids 14 and up though my four-year-old and seven-year-olds had a lot of fun helping me put it together. The reason for the 14 and up, is that for younger kids what you've really got a $500 remote controlled car. My kids had a lot of fun building the Robomaster and then driving around "my laser-shooting, remote controlled car" as my son calls it. It also shoots those water beads, which is pretty awesome for kids of any age, including me (note that is is much harder to hit things with the water beads).
But none of that fun gets at the point here, nor is it enough to justify the S1's price tag. What makes the Robomaster more STEM project than laser-shooting remote controlled car is the programmability. The learning does not stop when you're done assembling the S1, in fact that's just when the learning starts.
The courses available through the app and on DJI's site offer everything you need to get started writing programs in Scratch. The Python interface is less well documented, and, unfortunately, probably not a good way to learn Python thanks to the complexity of controlling the robot. Unless you're already familiar with Python, I would suggest Scratch for programming the S1, especially for kids.
There's also a RoboAcademy section in the app which offers some behind-the-scenes looks at the technology in use on S1. For example, there's a deep dive into how [Mecanum wheels work](https://www.dji.com/robomaster-s1/video-courses) in the S1.
The S1 was a ton of fun to test. It's very well made, and offers a well-thought-out introduction to robotics and programming. It's not cheap, but for kids who are old enough, and have an interest in STEM-oriented topics or programming, the S1 should make a good investment and serve as an introduction to the world of robotics.
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